Comment by qz_kb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qz_kb | Hacker News Reader

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How dedicated you are to do a task with no intrinsic value besides getting hired at companies with leetcode-style interviews. I don't think google is better off when everyone they hire has wasted hundreds of hours on a fundamentally useless skill rather than having used that time to learn different skills or just enjoy time with family and minimize the chance they burn out on the job at a later date.

There's other ways to tease out if someone is "dedicated to reaching a goal" like actually asking them questions about their life, daily routine, accomplishments etc. I think these are much better signals than "this person can implement many sorting algorithms and solve towers of hanoi or the egg drop puzzle without a google search to refresh their memory" with an N=1 sample size used to gauge how reliably they can do that. How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow?

I know grinding leetcode is fundamentally useless because you will immediately start losing your ability to interview once you get hired. If you don't change jobs within a year you'll need to start studying all that crap again for the next interview.

> How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow?

An excellent question.

If the interviewer is to ask such algorithms questions looked up on leetcode, etc, then they must be prepared for when the candidate asks if they also use it themselves on the job. If the interviewer admits they don't use it, then they also admitted that they don't know what they are looking for and really are wasting the candidate's time.

If it were me, I would look at open-source contributions (no hello-world or demo projects) where that is enough proof for me to evaluate an entry-level candidate and cut through the algorithms nonsense and ask questions to the candidate based on that which will save everyone time.

Yes, leetcode skills don't help every day. But I definitely enjoy & respect more fellow coders who have computational thinking skills, who can break down problems, who understand costs.

That this isn't the bulk of what we do doesn't change the fact that these challenges do test computational thinking acuity. Having the ability to see & speak computationally is a good skill, one that connects our day-to-day abstract practice with actual real processes. Being able to break down problems & analyze how to tackle them shows an objective ability to assess & work through problems. I want to work with people who can be clear, who can model & explain & step through situations.

And these skills are, generally, learnable, and relatively quickly. I disagree that these abilities fade, but yes, some re-familiarizing & re-training is probably important, especially because, as you point out, the sample size is indeed often N=1, and that's pretty wild.

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